Female Trouble

“Bait and switch” has such a harsh sound. In Sales one learns to speak of it as helping the client understand his until-then “undiscovered needs.”

I got a lot of undiscovered needs out of today’s tome, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams. Nominally the book is about late Norman/early Gothic architecture and the people who built such structures; in reality, he has written an exploration of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century mind. In the hands of any other author on the planet such an attempt would be instantly gag-worthy and would devolve into “validation” and veganism. Adams, however, is of earlier and much sterner stuff: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres was first published in 1904; its author was born in 1838. So one is reading a history within a history, medieval history as written by an authentic nineteenth-century voice writing in a twentieth-century world.

Outstanding.

But a few warnings apply when approaching a work that it itself an artifact of history. First, this one verges on the literary…hey, don’t give me heat: last month I gave you an actual textbook. The author’s prose style is a topic we shall return to, but for now be forewarned that Adams apostrophes a good bit. As in, he talks to and about people who aren’t there. We open with the conceit that he is a loving uncle taking us, his nieces (“…nephews, as a social class, no longer read at all, and there is only one familiar instance recorded of a nephew who read his uncle”) on an imaginary tour of the Abbey of Mont Saint Michel and the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres.

So far, so good: just what we thought we signed up for when seduced by the nifty photo on the cover. Except, of course, for being a niece (at my age!) and the imaginary travel and all.

We land first at Mont Saint Michel. That we start there isn’t exactly a news flash, but the short amount of time we spend in the place is unexpected. Mainly we’re there to see two rooms in the monks’ quarters, the Aquilon and the Promenoir. These are two large halls, the Aquilon below, built in the Norman style in 1112, and the Promenoir above, sitting on the same floor plan and built in the Gothic style in 1115. The author takes the pair to represent exactly a moment called the French Transition, which in context has to do with architectural styles, not pronouns. He deems the Norman architecture to be masculine and concerned with the art of war: the central tower of Norman churches mirrors that of Norman castles, the Archangel Michael is the angel of war, and Mont Saint Michel is, of course, his namesake.

With those few and potentially incendiary remarks, we’re off to Chartres, where we billet in for a while.

In fairness, Chartres is a cathedral with a fully developed program of art whereas Mont Saint Michel is a mere abbey church…there’s a lot to see here. We study the sculpture on the North Porch of the transept and find the art to be Byzantine (Eastern Roman Empire) in its detailing. Hint: naturalism isn’t the point. Nor is it in the stained glass, a major topic of discussion and a fascinating one that rates a chapter of its own. For the record, a man who can dismiss the slightly later Sainte-Chapelle as second-rate work done fast and dirty is a mightier homosexual than I. In Adams’s view glass artists were at heart colorists, who designed a window’s color scheme first and then made figures of those blobs of color. In his example, if an artist made a blue knight with a green face, it was not because the man was a lunatic; it was because the window needed green and blue there. And we find the little painted caricatures on the glass charmingly naïve not because we are superior to those poor, simple folk; rather, they got a kick out of cartoons, too.

After such prologue, we finally hit one of the real subjects of the book: Blanche of Castile.

Blanche is one of the dynamos of history, that much is undeniable. The daughter of King Alfonso of Castile, she married the future King Louis VIII of France in 1200. Blanche’s son with Louis, Louis IX, had a bright future ahead of him as king, saint, and namesake of an underappreciated Midwestern city. More relevant to Blanche’s personality and plans, her kid gave her not one, but two chances to serve as Queen Regent, once during her son’s minority and again during his sojourn on Crusade. Blanche was effective but not universally beloved…before his death, she and her husband Lou got involved in a war for the English throne, and to raise money for a navy Blanche offered to ransom off her own children, future saint included. That sort of thing. After Lou’s death several men, notably the kid’s uncle, Robert of Dreux, felt they had superior claim to the regency, and much politics and many battles ensued. Traces are seen in the windows of Chartres, where Blanche’s mighty Rose of France (Christ as child, subsumed in the Virgin) stands over the North arm of the transept in opposition to Robert’s equally grand and unyielding Rose of Dreux (Christ triumphant, ruling the world) which stands over the South arm.

To better understand Blanche, it helps to know her family. Specifically, that her grandmother was Eleanor of Guienne…whom we know as Eleanor of Aquitaine.

And it was in fact Eleanor who selected Blanche for the French throne. Blanche’s parents had contracted to marry a different daughter off to the French prince, but Grandma Eleanor considered any legal arrangements merely provisional, subject to her own approval. So in great old age Eleanor had herself hauled across the Pyrenees yet again (Eleanor always adored travel), surveyed the situation, and decided that Blanche, not her sister, was the one who should rule France. It seems never to have occurred to either the Spanish or the French monarchies to oppose Eleanor, and so the marriage was made.

Eleanor used to describe herself as “Queen, by the wrath of God.” Her children, at least three popes, and both of her husbands agreed.

Those who read history to be outraged will find Adams’s a satisfying volume. A book written a century ago reflects the sensibilities of its own time, not ours. Phrases like “the Jew art dealer” or “the Jew theatre owner” hit the ear hard, although those may be the only two examples; society got fastidious about adding the “-ish” mid-century. But more damningly to some, Adams sees the feminine as the persistent, unknowable Other. It’s a view terribly unfashionable today, although it is universally held by both men and women…one need only parse the phrase, “men just don’t get it” as evidence of present-day incomprehension on both sides.

In Adams’s world, however, the Other does not mean subordinate or subservient; quite the opposite. From Blanche and Eleanor our author turns first to the Virgin Mary and the rise of the Mary cult within Christianity. Mary, of course, is one of the least theological of figures…in Christian theology the action is in the Trinity, and the intellectual discourse of the time was around the nature of the three godheads, the so-called Arian (note the spelling) Heresy. Yet the cult of Mary grew, and Adams finds that popular representations of the Virgin somehow had a lot of Eleanor and Blanche in them…if you knew either woman, you’d be a fool to deny it, at least not where they could hear you.

And that is how Adams restores the balance to his work and redeems the bait and switch of his opening. He really does give Mont Saint Michel short shrift, but in the latter third of the book he turns to Abbé Abélard’s dialectics and Saint Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy. Those, then, are the opposing players and true subjects of the work: Eleanor, Blanche, and the Virgin facing off against Abélard, Aquinas, and the Trinity. He finds it an even match, or at least one a long way from resolved. Readers who can look past the slightly antiquated prose style will find that Adams has written a full-on feminist tract using the device of the two churches to frame his argument.

The Curmudgeon understands his position. I have been reading history faithfully to try to find these silent, submissive women that the current generation likes to blather about. Trouble is, I can’t find them: Adams makes a convincing case that you cannot understand the twelfth century without knowing Eleanor, nor can you understand the thirteenth without knowing Blanche. In the centuries following you had women like Joan of Kent, Elizabeth of York, Elizabeth I (whom Adams deems the direct successor to Eleanor and Blanche), Queen Anne (who united England and Scotland, an act neither Alfred the Great nor Æthelstan could accomplish), Victoria, Marie-Theresa, and the recently-deceased Elizabeth II, who ruled longer than anyone short of Louis XIV.

“Women’s stories,” it turns out, are only “absent from history” if you didn’t read the material and spent the entire lecture flirting with that cute boy in the third row.